Gratuitous space battles

Released On: Nov 16, 2009 My Score Hover and click to give a rating Saved Gratuitous Space Battles isn't for everyone, as its brand of strategy is entirely weighted towards the setup phase - and the execution is almost completely hands-off. Still, the prospect of building your own ships and using your own unique combinations of general strategies and offensive and defensive loadouts is very compelling for anyone who is a sci-fi space battle enthusiast. In the end, for all its talk of being "gratuitous," Gratuitous Space Battles is actually quite a lean, mean game with a unique premise and singularly charming personality. If you're even marginally interested in seeing heavily armed tin cans tear each other a new hull breach with beam lasers and torpedo missiles, give it a try. A well balanced, straightforward space combat simulator with customizable starships. A good value if you can pick up the game and all of the DLC on sale. Graphics are pretty nice and battles are truly gratuitous. Just watching the comm chatter from the ships is funny. I find being able to design and build your ships from scratch the most enjoyable part and I spend endless hours testing and building ships. I always wanted them to change it so that you can control the ships in battles and finally they have.Please note some old reviews might mention the absence of in battle control which has now changed! Still, the game retails at $20 and offers a far more satisfying level of capital ship space combat than any other game I've seen released over the last year. Imperfect spaceship engineering and asynchronous online dueling combine to deliver a flawed star. [Dec 2009, p.94] Managerial point of view to epic space battles. Good planning is necessary to enjoy this "Tower Defense"

Variation. [Issue#187] Gratuitous Space Battles manages to strike a respectable balance between casual gaming and deep, engaging strategy. The type of player that will enjoy the gratuitous space battles might well be put off by al the number crunching and preparation involved in just getting an effective fleet together. [Feb 2010, p.63] Excellent game. There are a ton of space strategy games, but this one takes a completely fresh and (imho) fascinating approach by removing battle-control entirely and making it really a game of fleet design and real strategy, rather than frantic tactical mouse clicking. The real key to getting the most from the game is to go back after you have won and try to design the smallest, cheapest fleet possible, but which can still achieve victory. The game is a tinkerers heaven, and the frankly excellent graphics are just the icing on top. Highly recommended. TOYS! Make spaceships and set them up to blow each other up. This is the space scalextric set, no controls except what the spaceships are and what the formations are. Set 'em up and watch 'em explode! When I play a game I like to, well, *play* the game instead of being forced to read walls of text just to understand the fundamentals. This is the main reason why I'm not really into strategy games."Gratuitous Space Battles" seems to be a fair game with a lot of things to do but I couldn't really be caught by it. Now I'll freely admit that I'm not massively into strategy games, but having picked this up in one of the recent indie bundles, I thought I'd give it a go. If ever there was a game that threw up barriers to introducing people to the strategy genre, this would be it. I get that strategy

Gratuitous Space Battles did not start off as a hybrid management/simulation/strategy space combat game. In fact, it started off as a turn based 'dictator-simulation' back in the dark days of 2008. In November 2008, I was starting work on the next game after Kudos 2, and had decided to do a game that was similar to Democracy, but from a dictators point of view. A sort of 'Virtual Saddam' game. It only took a few weeks of writing code for this for the game to strangely morph into a totally different direction, and before long I was working on a space strategy game. Thankfully, as an indie developer who self-funds, I can do this without having to get anyone's permission, or go through endless design meetings. Gratuitous Space Battles was born, but the name wouldn't be picked until February of the next year. In it's early days, like most games (even AAA) ones), GSB was put together with 'coder art', while the very basics of getting moving and firing ships was put together. Initially, the game looked like this: The very first screenshot from what would become gratuitous space battles Thankfully, it didn't stay like that for too long. Initially, I clung to a lot more of the typical Real time strategy game UI decisions that crop up in every game, meaning ships even had health bars over them (separate for hull and shields). This always looked pretty bad: Health bars over ships. Yuck. I also experimented with a 'burn' effect that is a cheap and easy way of getting glowing style images. The idea was that the game was not a real-world visual image of a space battle, but more what an admiral commanding the flagship might see on a tactical screen, similar to the view used by the klingon captain at the start of 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture'. This also made it look a bit too similar to the style of Introversion's games, and although I initially liked it, I'm glad I went in a realistic direction instead. It's all TRON's fault. Once I'd settled on an art style, I had to make that difficult indie-developer decision of whether or not I really needed to employ an artist, or whether I could buy stock images. Obviously, employing an artist to do original art would look better, but how much better? Did I even have the money to

Not sure activision do this with EA, but indies do) A good long rewrite of the UI sorted this out, and the game was in far better shape. Unused Fleet Design UI Of course, it's very true that the last 10% of game development takes the other 90% of the time, and that was very true with Gratuitous Space Battles. When I thought the game was finished, it was far from it. The screenshot below shows the original ship design UI. From a distance it looks the same, but at least 50 things got improved steadily on this screen, from better text edit boxes, to extra buttons to show more data, to sorting of data for better usability, to newer module background graphics, better tab buttons, and countless other minor tweaks. Nearly done UI This, of course only covers the UI of the game, which in something like GSB is vital, but also in code terms, pretty trivial in comparison with the graphics engine powering the thing. Although its commonly thought that 3D graphics are hard, whereas 2D graphics are easy and you don't need to optimize them any more on modern PC's, this is (to be frank) complete bullshit. It might be true if you are making a match-3 game, but if you have 300 spaceships per side, with damage textures, engine trails, flashing lights on wingtips, drifting space hulks, debris, explosions, missile trails, fancy shader effects, shield glow and impacts, cloaking devices and tractor beams, with parallax scrolling starfields, zoom and pan, a UI layered on the top, variable game speed and pause, sound effects for every weapon..... and all the AI for target selection and damage calculation for those ships in real time, then suddenly optimizing becomes your full time job. I spent a huge amount of time minimizing the amount of texture swaps and draw calls used by the game. The old graphics engine I'd used for earlier games was not up to the task and was junked, and an entirely new Directx9 engine was written for Gratuitous Space Battles. The engine isn't generic at all, it's purely designed around GSB, with all kinds of special case code to handle certain scenarios. For example, when bullet are drawn, they are drawn as a big group, to speed up rendering. This puts them *above* all the ships, yet because of the way the images work, and the

And the 12 missions from the classic board game.Multiplayer head-to-head recreating the board game experience against a friend! Get in the hot seat and battle it out with a friend.Cross platform multiplayer between Windows PC, Mac, Linux and iOS! Play asynchronous against friends and foes on multiple platforms.Now with online Co-op mode!ActionWarfareScience fictionActionWarfareScience fictionStar Trek: InfiniteStar Trek: Infinite is a grand strategy experience that lets you play your own Star Trek story as the leader of one of four major factions in the galaxy. Follow the specially crafted story or blaze your own trail in the first Star Trek grand strategy game.Science fiction4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate)SandboxScience fiction4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate)SandboxZEverything is in here from the terrific comedy cut scenes to the frantic game play making this is the definitive version of Z. Z is a real time war game played in a totally free environment where you undertake a breathtaking race to capture territory and resources. Crush your enemy before they overpower you.ActionComedyScience fictionActionComedyScience fictionGratuitous Space BattlesWho needs backstory? Who needs resource-gathering? Diplomacy is so last year. Gratuitous Space Battles cuts right to the chase of sci-fi strategy games, and deals with large, completely unjustified space battles between huge opposing space fleets.StarCraftStarCraft is a strategic game set in a Galaxy far away on multiple planets. Its style and balance between the three antagonistic species it features is unique and appealed to millions.Tempest RisingClassic RTS action meets modern production and performance in Tempest Rising. Inspired by RTS greats of the 90s and 2000s, Tempest Rising is a classic, base-building real time strategy game set in a modern day alternative history war scenario. It features 3 unique factions, each with its own approach to combat and economy and offering a variety of strategies for players of all stripes, deep and rewarding gameplay that keeps a focus on strategy while rewarding skill, and built-in customization options that allow players to approach the game their way in both single player and multiplayer game modes.ActionWarfareScience fictionActionWarfareScience fictionAge of Empires: Gold EditionMicrosoft's Age of Empires: Gold Edition is an epic real-time strategy title that collects the original Age of Empires and its Rise of Rome expansion set onto a single tactics-packed disc. Spanning more than 10,000 years of game time Age of Empires: Gold features three entirely new campaigns that showcase the bloody battles of Rome, in addition to four brand new

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